My daily readings 07/13/2011

Remember our story last week, discussing the copyright issues of monkeys taking photographs of themselves using a photographer’s camera that he had left alone? The whole post was about whether or not anyone had a legitimate copyright claim on the photos, noting that the photographer, David Slater, almost certainly did not have a claim, seeing as he did not take the photos, and even admits that the images were an accident from monkeys who found the camera (i.e., he has stated publicly that he did not “set up” the shot and let the monkeys take it). And yet, Caters News Agency has a copyright notice on two of the images, claiming to hold the rights to them. We doubted that the monkeys — who might have the best “claim” to copyright on these photos, if there is one, had licensed the images.

I think that honesty is a two-way street, especially in this scenario, and too many developers wind up holding a recruiter over a fire for what the developer perceives as a dishonest/snake oil salesman approach when they themselves are often inflating the truth either on their resume or when talking about previous accomplishments (I was guilty of this early in my career as well).

Now I do my part to be honest, and I look for the same in any recruiter I come across. I’ll echo Ed’s sentiment in saying thanks and it’s nice to read about recruiters who have a passion for the industry and the people in it and not just a passion for making the sale.

Tumblr respects this. From day one, David and I gave it free custom-domain support, full HTML control, and no forced branding or advertising. But Tumblr is a hybrid of a blog-publishing platform and a social network that seems truly unique — the “pure” social networks aren’t nearly as willing to allow you to own your identity there.

2) Have a short form blog an a different domain that you own and is permanent. Mine is at fredwilson.vc and hosted on Tumblr. This is where I put the things that fill out the story but don’t belong on a long form blog.

The most important part is to engage. The second most important part is own your online presence. Marco Arment has a great post on this point. He says: